The Impacts of Vedic Meditation: Your Questions Answered

The Impacts of Vedic Meditation: Your Questions Answered

[00:45] Q – How does Vedic Meditation fit in with talk therapy?

Hi, Thom! I have friends and family members who have been in therapy for more than five years. They don’t have a diagnosed condition and aren’t on any medication. I’m sure the therapy has helped them, but from the outside, they seem to have hit a plateau with their progress. Could you please speak to the compatibility of Vedic Meditation with talk therapy and the advantages Vedic Meditation might have over talk therapy in terms of moving someone forward?

[01:16] A – A Fault of the Age of Ignorance

I think talk therapy is a very good thing, but it needs to reach its crescendo.

There’s a certain point, the word therapy means, literally, doing something, doing a thing. And if it turns out that after months, and then year and then multiple years and then decades and multiple decades, there seems to be the ever-repeating known, there is evolution happening therapeutically, but it is so slow, and the crescendo hasn’t been reached.

The crescendo means the high point of maximum impact of the therapy needs to be reached earlier. And so then when we practice Vedic Meditation, what it does is it speeds up the therapeutic process.

And so, a meditator who’s practicing twice every day should begin to see more traction and more rapid movement toward the therapeutic goals. And very often because, especially in the west, and especially the west of the west, the western most part of the west, there is a tremendous idea that absolutely everybody needs to be in therapy at least once a week. Constantly.

Now there’s nothing wrong with that. What we’ve done as a civilization is we’ve downgraded the capacity of our elders of society to be wise people, and we consider our elders just to be nuisances who are out of date and aging and their health is falling apart. And we’re most constantly trying to figure out with what we’re going to do with them, rather than how we’re going to spend more time with them to get their wisdom, because they don’t seem to have any.

This is one of the faults of an age of ignorance is the loss of the function of elder people actually being wiser than younger people. It turns out that younger people, in many cases, are wiser than their elders, and this becomes problematic.

[03:42] Providing Context for Content

And so when that problem creeps up, then an entire industry of people who are supposed to be wiser than their clients, and that’s the therapeutic community. And in many cases it’s true that their training provides them with the capacity to provide you with perspective.

And the pattern is one goes to the therapist with content and the therapist gives context for the content. That’s what therapy’s all about.

“I can’t believe she said that,” or, “I can’t believe he did this,” or “I can’t believe that once again, I’m feeling anxious over this.” That’s content.

And then the therapist is supposed to say, “Now, we’ve been here before and what we’ve seen in the past is…” Or, “Why don’t you look at it from this perspective?” And so on and so forth.

There is the building of, we have to put some fat on this thing. This content is skeletal, but it needs fat added to it, fat and muscle added to it. And that’s the perspective gained by placing it contextually, adding time to it.

“What is the consequence of the content you brought me in a 10-year context? Let’s look at it and then maybe if we don’t want to look at 10 years, because it may be too much. How about 10 weeks? How about 10 months or whatever?” 

So to contextualize and to achieve perspective through contextualizing is the therapist’s job. Most therapists would never even be able to use this language because they’ve never learned it.

This is Vedic psychology I’m talking here and all therapists use this, whether or not they know it and whether or not they can express it.

[05:44] What Are the Therapeutic Goals?

One of the things that almost all clients of therapists fail to do, and therapists are also guilty because they don’t encourage their clients to do it, is to ask the question, “What are the therapeutic goals and where’s this leading?”

It’s not just, “We’re going to get together, either electronically or in person and go over the most recent content of my mind, and you’re going to make me feel better.” What is the therapeutic goal? And if there’s not able to be expressed some therapeutic goals, then that kind of therapy is in fact just the ever-repeating known.

When both of you don’t know what the therapeutic goal is, one of you is not needed, and that’s the therapist. We need to have a therapist who actually understands what a therapeutic goal is, and we need to ask that question of our therapist. It’s a fair question to ask.

If they can’t answer what the therapeutic goal is or if they go, “I don’t know,” or if they say, “What do you think?” That’s not a fair question.

If a child is learning how to read and the child says to the teacher, ” What’s the goal of me learning to read?”

And the teacher says, “I don’t know. What do you think?” Then you fire that teacher. So we shouldn’t have hesitancy in firing a therapist who, beyond giving us a sounding board and making us feel good because we’re able to hear ourselves talking, doesn’t know what the therapeutic goal is.

[07:36] Self-Sufficiency – The Ultimate Therapeutic Goal

And so let’s not be afraid of the word self-sufficiency or self-reliance. This should be a major therapeutic goal, which is, the major therapeutic goal is, that your therapist either retires the therapeutic process or you retire the therapeutic process, and if there’s not a goal in sight and a timeline that a therapist can speak to, then really the two of you are engaged in mutual self-deception.

So, with the practice of Vedic Meditation, one’s capacity to come more rapidly to these conclusions should be there. A conclusion that could have been arrived at, say, in five years, should be able to be arrived at in five months with practice.

What’s the conclusion? I don’t mean that you necessarily retire your therapist in five months, but that you’re conclusive within five months about what’s going on here? There are patterns that I can see. I arrive with content. My therapist gives me context. What am I learning? I should be learning how to create context for my content rather than exporting that responsibility to somebody else.

If constantly I have to export the responsibility of giving context to my content to another human being, but I’m not learning what it is that human being is doing and creating the context, then I’m in a negative learning environment. I’m not learning anything.

If I’m not learning anything, I need to find a teacher who’s actually interested in me. A therapist in that regard is a teacher, even though they might shy away from that title, but a therapist is a teacher. They’re supposed to be teaching you what the process is that the therapist is engaging in, and giving you a degree of greater settled mind by providing context for content.

And if the therapist is afraid of doing that or not doing that, then all they’re really interested in is keeping you as a client because you’re helping to pay for their children’s dental work or the next swimming pool or something.

So therapeutic goals are very important to ask about, to understand, to engage in, and to strive towards. There needs to be a therapeutic goal.

And basically what it is is self-reliance, self-sufficiency. That’s the ultimate therapeutic goal.

[10:29] Q – Why are some Vedic Meditators still jerks? 

Why is it that some Vedic meditators still act like jerks? What’s the explanation for someone who is regular and devoted to their meditation practice, who also seems to violate the laws of nature and cut across the interests of others? Would there be some inference that Vedic Meditation isn’t an effective practice for everyone?

[10:56] A – The Question is a Reflection of the Questioner

See, the thing is, a hypercritical view of another meditator and what they’re up to, the same question could be asked about the hypercritical view. “Oh, there’s that meditator who’s acting like a jerk. Oh, there’s that meditator who practices twice every day and isn’t behaving according to my standard. Oh, there’s that person who’s practicing meditation twice a day and is still behaving in ways that cuts across the interest of others.”

The whole thing is that this tendency of calumny. You know what calumny means? I’ll tell you. Calumny means the tendency to find negativity about another human. And then to speak the negativity has another Victorian-English name, which is to cavil. To cavil, C-A-V-I-L is to speak ill of others.

Why are we speaking ill of another Vedic meditator, would be my question.

Rather than, “Oh, that meditator’s behaving this way. I don’t approve.” When were we invited into the seat of all righteous judgment? When were we invited to be the adjudicator of what is going across the interest of others and not? Why are we fixated on the behavior of one meditator?

We have to ask a question about our own practice. Are we practicing regularly? Are we actually following the Vedic worldview, which says, by the way, this is Lord Krishna talking to Arjuna. Krishna speaking with Arjuna on the battlefield, and Arjuna says, “Why are you giving me this knowledge?”

And Krishna says to him, “I’m giving you this knowledge because you never speak ill of others.”

We know that somebody who speaks ill of others, that means they have ill in their own heart, they have ill in their own mind. And that ill that they have in their own heart and their own mind is resonating with that that they see outside them, and it comes out. It comes out as speech. So speaking ill of others is a sign of what’s inside of a person.

And so we have to look at the question from that perspective of, it’s not our desired habit in our spiritual practice, in Vedic spiritual practice, to find ourselves speaking ill of others. We wish the best for others. Neither we speak ill of them, nor we think ill of them because a thought in a Vedic meditator is very, very powerful.

[13:50] Don’t Water the Weeds

When you have a thought about somebody that is less than elevating, then your consciousness is powerful and you’re capable of pushing them down to be that low. We have to have thoughts wishing and hoping for them to improve their status, to improve their capability, to improve their exemplary behavior. Not simply commenting on what we consider those behaviors that don’t suit us.

And so, rather than seeking a commentary from me on why does another meditator behave badly, I have to ask the question of my questioner, why is it that your attention is attracted only to negativity?

Start learning how to put your attention on the best behaviors. Somebody, whatever they’re doing, they can’t be all bad. They can’t be all bad. Let’s put our attention on those things that they do that are good. Let’s put our attention on those things that they do that are helpful and uplifting.

What we put our attention on, that tends to grow. Whatever we attend to tends to grow. There’s an analogy that comes from the Upanishads of somebody with a bucket, but we’re going to turn it into a hose because it’s modern times. The hose of water that’s coming out all the time; that’s attention.

And the person goes over to their garden, their vegetable garden, and they see weeds, some little weeds sprouting out of the ground. So they go and stand at the weeds wondering, “What are these weeds? What are these weeds? Look at these nasty weeds. They’ve got spiky leaves. They’ve got sticky stuff on them. They attract the wrong kinds of bugs.” And all the time the water’s pouring on them.

And then they walk away and come back the next day and the weeds are bigger and they wonder why. It’s because you’ve been watering them. Then you bring somebody else over who also has their hose. And you say, “Come over here. Look at these weeds. Look how terrible they are.” Now you have two people watering the weeds, and it shouldn’t be any surprise that the next day the weeds get even bigger.

So the lesson in all of this is, let’s attend to that which we wish to grow. Let’s not attend to that which we do not wish to grow. Attention on that which we do not wish to grow is a certain way of making that which we purport not to want, to grow even more.

[16:30] Vedic Meditation Always Aids Progress

And if we… your grandmother could have taught you this. If we don’t have anything nice to say about someone, better not to speak at all. Find another subject. Find another subject. At least that meditator is meditating. We don’t know how bad they would’ve been if they hadn’t taken up the practice. They may not be meeting your supreme standard for great behavior, but at least they’re practicing meditation twice every day.

Who knows? If they hadn’t learned, they could have been Atilla the Hun by now, one of the worst, terrible terrorists ever to exist on Earth. But now all they’re doing is upsetting you a little bit, as a result of them practicing Vedic Meditation twice a day. All they do is upset you a little bit.

So who knows? We don’t know what’s being prevented. There could be a tremendous amount being prevented, and it’s very, very difficult to prove what you’ve prevented. If successfully you prevent a thing, then you can’t prove that you prevented it because it never happened.

But we do know one thing, people don’t get worse from practicing Vedic Meditation. They only ever get better. And the person may not be progressing at a speed that suits your judgment, but they’re progressing at a speed that’s greater than they would otherwise have done. So let’s be content in that and rest our heart, and let’s look around for examples of those who are advancing faster than us, and have our attention on advancing as fast as they are.

Jai Guru Deva.

[18:19] Q – Why Should I Add Vedic Meditation to My Spiritual Practices?

So I know you’ve talked a lot about, I love the example of the Cosmic, the human and the Cosmic coming together, and that’s really what’s giving us our purpose. So I practice a lot of other spiritual techniques and I meditate every now and again. But I guess, what’s so special about Vedic Meditation? Like why would I look to change some of my current spiritual practices to move into this spiritual practice? Or am I already connecting with the Cosmic through what I’m doing today?

[18:52] A – Thinking About Thinking

Here’s the thing, you can’t connect with the Cosmic. You are the Cosmic. There’s not a process of connecting the individual with the Cosmic. They’re already connected.

What we have to do is experience the pre-existing connection, the pre-existing junction point between individuality and Cosmic. So we have to experience it and incorporate it.

Now, the word spiritual… people often say to me, “I have a spiritual practice.”

And I’ll say, “Fantastic. So do I. What’s yours?”

“Oh, I swim and when I swim I’m looking at that black line in the swimming pool and following that black line, and I’m just having the greatest thoughts and the most liberating, and I’m swimming and swimming and swimming. That’s my spiritual practice.” Fantastic.

Somebody else will say, “My spiritual practice is reading scripture.” What they consider to be scripture. Something written by somebody else that was passed along for hundreds of years by word of mouth and eventually written down, and they read that and it gives them contemplation. It gives them a sense of context. It causes their thinking to be liberated.

But it’s still thinking. It’s still thinking. Swimming, looking at the line, thinking. Running, thinking. Sitting and being mindful or mindless, whatever, thinking. Thinking about thinking. Thinking about not thinking.

[20:39] Thought Clusters and Spiritual Essence

And I hold that none of these things actually is spiritual. Why? The word spirit means essence. Essence. What is your essence?

The spirit of a thing is the essence of a thing. The spirit. Your spirit is you, your essence is you minus all the thoughts. Can you experience consciousness without thinking? If you can, then you’re having a spiritual experience.

You’re experiencing spirit, you’re experiencing essence. Your essence is consciousness. Your essence is not the thoughts that get produced by consciousness. The thoughts that get produced by consciousness are only the most recent cluster.

So, you know, when you were nine or 10 years old, you had thought clusters. “Little Sammy at the playground did this and I did that, and tomorrow if I see Sammy, I’m going to give him some chewing gum because he gave me half a stick of chewing gum yesterday.” And all the kind of thought clusters that you have when you’re seven, eight, and nine years old. “I’ll ride the bus tomorrow,” or “I’ll do this tomorrow,” or “I’ll do that.” Whatever.

So what was your spirit at that time? Well, it’s the same as it is today. The underlying consciousness field, the thought clusters that you had at the age of 8, 9, 10, 11, and so on, those were the most recent thought clusters, and the way that we identify ourselves. “I identify myself as whatever I’ve been thinking lately about stuff.”

So what is it you were thinking lately about stuff when you were 15? You now have a different set of thought clusters to those. Your identity, your sense of what you are when you were 15 was just whatever thoughts came most consistently when you were 15. Those thoughts are gone, then you turn 20 and those thoughts are gone. And if my dear questioner is more than 20, then you know, when you turn 25, the 20-year-old thoughts were all gone.

[22:58] Here’s How to Experience Being

What this means is my sense of what I am cannot be my spirit if my sense of what I am is just the most recent bunch of thoughts I’ve been having. I had certain ideas about transport when I was 20 and personal transportation. Was I going to ride a bicycle or ride a motorcycle, ride a car, or ride a bus, or whatever? And I had thoughts about that.

And so part of my identity is what I think about transporting my body. Part of my identity is what I think about tattoos. Part of my identity is what I think about my clothes. Part of my identity is what I think about different political parties.

Let five years go by, that thought cluster has utterly changed. Now there’s a new one. If this is my “what I am,” just what I’ve been thinking lately, then my identity is not stable. I don’t have one indivisible whole identity. I have an identity that’s just made up of a bunch of thoughts, and these thoughts are also going to change, and that means my identity’s going to change.

And if I really want to know my true spirit, I have to go beyond thought. This is why Vedic Meditation is unique. It is the only method that is designed to, or even purports to take you beyond thought. Other methods do not even purport to take you beyond thought. They purport to take you into thought.

“I guarantee you, you’ll be thinking differently about yourself after my three-week course in how to think differently about yourself.”

I guarantee you, you’ll be thinking about the teachings of the historic Buddha, when I give you a three-week course in how the historic Buddha thought.”

“I guarantee you, you’ll be thinking differently…” It’s all thinking. Thinking about thinking about thinking about thinking.

Vedic Meditation transcends all of that. We don’t say, “Here’s how to think.” We say, “Here’s how to experience Being. How to experience Being. How to experience what you are fundamentally beyond thought. That which is beyond thought.”

So, without the beyond thought part, we’re not experiencing spiritual. We’re not experiencing spirit. We’re experiencing thinking.

So Vedic Meditation is an enormous aid in sorting out which thoughts are relevant and which are not. Once you experience spirit, once you experience essence, once you experience Being with a capital B, capital B, you’re experiencing the Absolute. That that doesn’t change inside you.

And it is that, that it is crucial to experience, if indeed we wish to be spiritual. Otherwise we’re not actually having a spiritual experience, we’re having yet another thought cluster. Just another thought cluster.